Friday, October 2, 2015

Harmony in Red by Henri Matisse

The painting Russians call “The red room” is
considered by many to be Matisse’s crowning achievement. When introduced
in 1908 such a quantity of red had never been seen in European painting
before. It features a maid putting fruit on a table in a room draped in
red wallpaper. The color and patterns on the decorative tablecloth and
the wallpaper are the same, flattening the picture plane. The view
outside the window looks like a painting hung on the wall of the same
room and hints at an array of organic patterns and serpentine plant
forms outside that share the interior’s theme.

This “decorative panel” was intended for the dining room in the
Moscow mansion of the famous Russian collector Sergey Shchukin.
Eventually prerevolutionary art collections that include works by
Picasso and Matisse were shut down by Stalin in 1948 as ideologically suspect. The painting emerged from Moscow cellars only after Stalin’s death.
The painting was not always red. Originally named “Harmony in Blue”
Matisse painted over it to intensify the feeling of flatness. He was
pushing the boundaries of the norm and advancing the avant garde. (The
old man was a “bad-ass”) as the kids would say.
It’s been suggested that the dining-room is really a view of the artist inside his studio and that the maid is an alter ego
of Matisse himself arranging the table in the same manner that the
painter arranges a canvas. Now, if Matisse wore his hair in a bun I
would say it was an uncanny likeness. But frankly, I’m not seeing it.

About Pablo Matisse

Contact: dane.lachiusa at yahoo dot com - 917-647-6149.
I am Pablo Matisse! Appropriating the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse with paintings that represent a uniquely derivative post-modern kind of beauty. Call it Ironic Pastiche perhaps, since beauty is a dirty word. The thingly thing about post- modernism is that all the old styles are up for grabs, but none of the meanings are the same. Of course, every artist has some previous artist's work in mind when they are creating a new image. We are all the fruit of Matisse and Picasso. It's the modification of that recognition that draws you into my work. I interpret, I don't copy. I appropriate key elements so that the riff on each artist is unmistakable. My work would not function otherwise. I hope my work represents a break from the past. One day I'll be the past. Perhaps me and now don't fit. Someone said Arts new system of Now are mutations of their old system of then. Or perhaps they were putting us on. -Pablo Matisse